05/31/2026
"If the circus is to be capable of staging contemporary subjectivities and identities, it is crucial that we start experimenting with different relationships to our apparatuses, techniques and/or objects. Already the relationship between the body and the object has changed dramatically over the last twenty years. It has gone from physical dominance over the trajectories of the object (traditional circus and nouveau cirque), to the object dominating the trajectories of the body (contemporary circus). This is a very important shift, and one that perhaps reflects or engages with our contemporary experience of the world. Like the understanding of human action as fundamentally tragic, it connects circus to the culture and the times in which we live.
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If we want circus to become more innovative, surprising, weird and disturbing, we need to understand the intimate bond between the forms of the circus and the content that we can express within those forms. We need to find out what specifics define circus as circus, and this beyond technical skill. Any attempt at defining what we do must be matched by an attempt to mark out the field for artistic research within circus. The two overlap. They are two poles on the same continuum. Without research no ‘new’ definition of the medium can be reached, and without a ‘new’ definition of the medium there can be no possible pathways for artistic research beyond technical skill.
Since circus has historically occupied a somewhat marginal position within the performing arts (as it did in society in general) we need to understand the dynamics of our changing position. Maybe it is time to go beyond circus. Let us search for countless different answers to the questions of why we want to do circus, how we want to do circus, and what we (can possibly) express by doing circus. Let us do that together. Let us discuss and contradict each other."
-BAUKE LIEVENS' OPEN LETTER TO THE CIRCUS "The need to redefine"
( https://thecircusdialogues.com/open-letter/the-need-to-redefine/ )
Between Being and Imagining: Towards a Methodology for Contemporary Circus (2013-17) brought into practice several dramaturgical ‘actions’ in dialogue. This first artistic research project by Bauke Lievens tried to make connections between theory and practice, between the ‘inside’ of circus ...
